Color me bad

For a bookworm whose job often keeps him in front of a laptop, having an Amazon Prime account is like handing whiskey and car keys to a teenage boy. My latest impulsive infraction is John Zmirak’s The Bad Catholic’s Guide to the Catechism. I’m a huge fan of his other funny, irreverent, orthodox, and learned Bad Catholic guides, so I’m looking forward to devouring this one. Here’s a sample from Fr. C. John McCloskey’s review:

Question: So why insist on the Virgin Birth?

Answer: Well, most obviously because (and I don’t mean to sound like a hard-shell Baptist here) it’s in the frickn’ Bible. Clear as day. There is a long narrative explaining in painful detail how an angel appeared to Mary and told her something impossible would happen and how her fiancé Joseph reacted — by nodding at her and smiling as he slowly backed out of the room. Can’t you hear him saying to himself, “Boy, did I dodge that bullet,” as he logged on to JDate.com? …

One of the many reasons I steer away from some of the “new school” (actually, now about 150 years old) interpretations of Scripture is because they produce much thinner “explanations” than the ones they pooh-pooh. For example, there are those who think they’re being rather smart when they say, oh, the Gospels don’t really teach the Virgin Birth, that’s just something imposed on the Gospels, and we’ve “freed” them from that imposition.

When I see things like that, I just shake my head. What Gospels are these people reading? The virgin birth–and the perpetual virginity of Mary, and her immaculate conception as well–are strongly supported by Scripture. And what is so revealing is when these folks presuppose that these doctrines are a matter of a few verses; that’s when I, at least, decide they really don’t know how to read Scripture, or they don’t ever actually do it.

For example: suppose that these folks are correct and Joseph actually fathered our Lord. In that event, the opening genealogy of Matthew is now off-kilter. Because as it is–in light of the Virgin Birth, it makes perfect sense: this family tree includes many who are “outsiders” who are brought in; and when it gets to our Lord, he must be adopted by Joseph, in order to be part of that family tree as well. And then the interactions between heaven and Joseph make sense, because he must choose to take Mary and her Son into his home. (While some may argue our Lord descended from David through Mary, that’s not what Matthew’s genealogy demonstrates: it traces the lineage to Joseph, and emphasizes that.)

The whole beginning of Matthew makes perfect sense, when you realize that just as so many in that lineage were grafted in–and even our Lord, after a fashion, was too–and then, by the end of the Gospel, the Apostles are sent out to all the world in order to graft in the rest of us.

Historical-critical tools of Scriptural interpretation have their uses; used well (our holy father of late made good use of them, for example), they are helpful. But unfortunately, they are also misused.

One of the marriage preps my wife and I had to do, in order to be married at her parish (I wasn’t Catholic at the time), was to meet with the pastor a few times. When he asked if I had any questions, I asked him about Jesus lineage to David being through Joseph even though Joseph wasn’t his “real” father.

He didn’t answer as articulately as you. He didn’t like me very much. Probably not only because I asked him difficult questions.